Convergence analysis of a joint signal-to-noise ratio and channel estimator for frequency selective channels in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing context

In this article, the authors study the convergence of an iterative algorithm for the joint estimation of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the transmission channel in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing context. At each step of the algorithm, the authors use the minimum-mean-square error (MMSE)-based SNR estimation, which feeds the linear MMSE channel estimation. Reciprocally, this efficient channel estimation is used to perform the SNR estimation. The authors provide a proof of convergence of the algorithm to a single value. Furthermore, we derive an accurate approximation of the bias of the estimation. Simulations show that the algorithm converges quickly and verifies the theoretical results. They also show the efficiency of both SNR and channel estimation. By comparing with the existing methods, the authors show that the tradeoff between the number of required pilots in the preamble and the performance of the SNR estimation were improved. Furthermore, for a fixed bit error rate, the SNR gap between the proposed channel estimation and the perfect one is <;0.5 dB.